OpenAI said on Thursday it was launching its "Strawberry" series of AI models designed to spend more time processing answers to queries in order to solve hard problems. The models are capable of reasoning through complex tasks and can solve more challenging problems than previous models in science, coding and math, the AI firm said in a blog post. OpenAI used the code name Strawberry to refer to the project internally, while it dubbed the models announced on Thursday o1 and o1-mini. The o1 will be available in ChatGPT and its API starting Thursday, the company said. ChatGPT has struggled to recognize that the word "strawberry" contains three instances of the letter R. Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI focused on improving reasoning in the company's models, confirmed in a post on X that the models were the same as the Strawberry project.

OpenAI has unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model called o1, which, the company claims, can perform complex reasoning tasks more effectively than its predecessors. The release comes as OpenAI faces increasing competition in the race to develop more sophisticated AI systems. O1 was trained to "spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would," OpenAI said on its website. "Through training, [the models] learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes." OpenAI envisions the new model being used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, by physicists to generate mathematical formulas and software developers.

The findings could represent an important step forward in how we engage with and educate people who espouse such baseless theories, says Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang, a postdoc fellow affiliated with the Psychology of Technology Institute who studies AI's impacts on society. "They show that with the help of large language models, we can--I wouldn't say solve it, but we can at least mitigate this problem," he says. "It points out a way to make society better." Few interventions have been proven to change conspiracy theorists' minds, says Thomas Costello, a research affiliate at MIT Sloan and the lead author of the study. Part of what makes it so hard is that different people tend to latch on to different parts of a theory.

OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach--a model that can "reason" logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up. The new model, dubbed OpenAI-o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI's most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking out loud as a person might, before arriving at the right result. "This is what we consider the new paradigm in these models," Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, tells WIRED.

The first of the two methods is called Retrieval-Interleaved Generation (RIG), which acts as a sort of fact-checker. If a user prompts the model with a question--like "Has the use of renewable energy sources increased in the world?"--the model will come up with a "first draft" answer. Then RIG identifies what portions of the draft answer could be checked against Google's Data Commons, a massive repository of data and statistics from reliable sources like the United Nations or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Next, it runs those checks and replaces any incorrect original guesses with correct facts. It also cites its sources to the user.

Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) for education have highlighted a critical challenge: ensuring that explanations for state-of-the-art AI models are understandable for non-technical users such as educators and students. In response, we introduce iLLuMinaTE, a zero-shot, chain-of-prompts LLM-XAI pipeline inspired by Miller's cognitive model of explanation. iLLuMinaTE is designed to deliver theory-driven, actionable feedback to students in online courses. iLLuMinaTE navigates three main stages - causal connection, explanation selection, and explanation presentation - with variations drawing from eight social science theories (e.g. Abnormal Conditions, Pearl's Model of Explanation, Necessity and Robustness Selection, Contrastive Explanation). We extensively evaluate 21,915 natural language explanations of iLLuMinaTE extracted from three LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemma2-9B, Llama3-70B), with three different underlying XAI methods (LIME, Counterfactuals, MC-LIME), across students from three diverse online courses. Our evaluation involves analyses of explanation alignment to the social science theory, understandability of the explanation, and a real-world user preference study with 114 university students containing a novel actionability simulation. We find that students prefer iLLuMinaTE explanations over traditional explainers 89.52% of the time. Our work provides a robust, ready-to-use framework for effectively communicating hybrid XAI-driven insights in education, with significant generalization potential for other human-centric fields.

In the field of machine learning, domain-specific annotated data is an invaluable resource for training effective models. However, in the medical domain, this data often includes Personal Health Information (PHI), raising significant privacy concerns. The stringent regulations surrounding PHI limit the availability and sharing of medical datasets, which poses a substantial challenge for researchers and practitioners aiming to develop advanced machine learning models. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to "clone" datasets containing PHI. Our approach ensures that the cloned datasets retain the essential characteristics and utility of the original data without compromising patient privacy. By leveraging differential-privacy techniques and a novel fine-tuning task, our method produces datasets that are free from identifiable information while preserving the statistical properties necessary for model training. We conduct utility testing to evaluate the performance of machine learning models trained on the cloned datasets. The results demonstrate that our cloned datasets not only uphold privacy standards but also enhance model performance compared to those trained on traditional anonymized datasets. This work offers a viable solution for the ethical and effective utilization of sensitive medical data in machine learning, facilitating progress in medical research and the development of robust predictive models.

Generative AI (GenAI) has been shown to enhance individual productivity in a guided setting. While it is also likely to transform processes in a collaborative work setting, it is unclear what trajectory this transformation will follow. Collaborative environment is characterized by a blend of origination tasks that involve building something from scratch and iteration tasks that involve refining on others' work. Whether GenAI affects these two aspects of collaborative work and to what extent is an open empirical question. We study this question within the open-source development landscape, a prime example of collaborative innovation, where contributions are voluntary and unguided. Specifically, we focus on the launch of GitHub Copilot in October 2021 and leverage a natural experiment in which GitHub Copilot (a programming-focused LLM) selectively rolled out support for Python, but not for R. We observe a significant jump in overall contributions, suggesting that GenAI effectively augments collaborative innovation in an unguided setting. Interestingly, Copilot's launch increased maintenance-related contributions, which are mostly iterative tasks involving building on others' work, significantly more than code-development contributions, which are mostly origination tasks involving standalone contributions. This disparity was exacerbated in active projects with extensive coding activity, raising concerns that, as GenAI models improve to accommodate richer context, the gap between origination and iterative solutions may widen. We discuss practical and policy implications to incentivize high-value innovative solutions.

The performance of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in information retrieval is significantly influenced by the characteristics of the documents being processed. In this study, the structured nature of textbooks, the conciseness of articles, and the narrative complexity of novels are shown to require distinct retrieval strategies. A comparative evaluation of multiple documentsplitting methods reveals that the Recursive Character Splitter outperforms the Token-based Splitter in preserving contextual integrity. A novel evaluation technique is introduced, utilizing an open-source model to generate a comprehensive dataset of question-and-answer pairs, simulating realistic retrieval scenarios to enhance testing efficiency and metric reliability. The evaluation employs weighted scoring metrics, including SequenceMatcher, BLEU, METEOR, and BERT Score, to assess the system's accuracy and relevance. This approach establishes a refined standard for evaluating the precision of RAG systems, with future research focusing on optimizing chunk and overlap sizes to improve retrieval accuracy and efficiency. 2

Despite their wide adoption, the biases and unintended behaviors of language models remain poorly understood. In this paper, we identify and characterize a phenomenon never discussed before, which we call semantic leakage, where models leak irrelevant information from the prompt into the generation in unexpected ways. We propose an evaluation setting to detect semantic leakage both by humans and automatically, curate a diverse test suite for diagnosing this behavior, and measure significant semantic leakage in 13 flagship models. We also show that models exhibit semantic leakage in languages besides English and across different settings and generation scenarios. This discovery highlights yet another type of bias in language models that affects their generation patterns and behavior.